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Gender in 19th-century Britain | The British Library

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Kathryn Hughes explores the role of women in middle class Victorian society.

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'Art for art's sake'? Aestheticism and decadence shocked the Victorian establishment by challenging traditional values, foregrounding sensuality and promoting artistic, sexual and political experimentation. Dr Carolyn Burdett explores the key features of this unconventional artistic period.

Aestheticism

Many Victorians passionately believed that literature and art fulfilled important ethical roles. Literature provided models of correct behavior: it allowed people to identify with situations in which good actions were rewarded, or it provoked tender emotions. At best, the sympathies stirred by art and literature would spur people to action in the real world. The supporters of aestheticism, however, disagreed, arguing that art had nothing to do with morality. Instead, art was primarily about the elevation of taste and the pure pursuit of beauty. More controversially, the aesthetes also saw these qualities as guiding principles for life. They argued that the arts should be judged on the basis of form rather than morality. The famous motto 'art for art's sake' encapsulates this view. It meant prising the sensual qualities of art and the sheer pleasure they provide. 'Art for art's sake' became identified with the energy and creativity of aestheticism - but it also became a shorthand way of expressing the fears of those who saw this uncoupling of art and morality as dangerous. Aestheticism unsettled and challenged the values of mainstream Victorian culture. As it percolated more widely into the general culture, it was relentlessly satirised and condemned.

Caricature of Oscar Wilde as Narcissus

Caricature of Oscar Wilde as Narcissus featuring the key Aesthetic motif of the sunflower; the artist accuses Aesthetes of vanity and egotism.

Although references to the 'aesthetic movement' are commonplace, there was no unified or organised movement as such. Critics still disagree about when aestheticism began and who should be included under its label. Some associate the movement with the Pre-Raphaelites, who were active from the mid-19th century. Their emphasis on sensual beauty and on strong connections between visual and verbal forms was certainly highly influential. Perhaps the most important inaugurating phase of aestheticism, however, occurred during the late 1860s and early 1870s.

Walter Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance

Walter Pater's Conclusion to Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) heavily influenced Aestheticism. Note his reference to 'art for art's sake' in the last line.

Swinburne and Pater

The poet Charles Algernon Swinburne is a crucial figure of this period. Strongly influenced by the French writers, Charles Baudelaire and Théophile Gautier, Swinburne agreed with them that poetry had nothing to do with didacticism (the teaching of moral lessons). He also insisted that beautiful poetic form and what he deemed 'perfect workmanship' made any subject admirable. Like Baudelaire, he put this argument into practice by combining lyrical language and complex metrical rhythms with subject matter commonly seen as antithetic to aesthetically pleasing poetry. Themes of perverse sexuality or cruelty and violence shockingly dismantled what many Victorians felt were necessary or even natural lines drawn between aesthetic beauty and repellent or 'ugly' morality. Mainstream Victorian culture saw art and literature as a means of self-improvement or a spur to good works. Swinburne's poetry instead presented readers with moral ambiguity and provided them no comfortable psychological position.

Also influenced by French ideas was the critic Walter Pater. His 1873 Studies in the History of the Renaissance is widely regarded as the manifesto of aestheticism. In a period when the Middle Ages were celebrated, Pater instead advocated Renaissance culture. He praised the renaissance artists' individualism and also their acknowledgement of hidden and mysterious motives and desires. But his most provocative and influential statements came in the book's famous 'Conclusion'. Flying in the face of Victorian notions of both objective reality and eternal truths, Pater described a world of fleeting impressions. All the individual has is the subjective experience provided by intense sensory engagement with lovely things. Pater advises that the wisest people will seek to concentrate all their energies and efforts on the pleasure of these moments. For some, this seemed a recipe for self-indulgence through the hedonistic pursuit of pleasure. For others, though, it was a breathtakingly radical call to cast off the heavy weight of Victorian moralism and Christian doctrine in the name of art.

Walter Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance

Walter Pater's Conclusion to Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), describing a world of fleeting impressions.

Aesthetic style

Poetry was central to aestheticism, from the work of Pre-Raphaelites (especially Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Christina Rossetti), Swinburne and William Morris, through to the flourishing of poetic voices in the final decades of the 19th century. After being lost to sight for much of the 20th century, recent literary scholarship has retrieved many important women poets of this period, including Alice Meynell and Amy Levy. Equally important, though, were the prose forms associated with aestheticism - and especially the essay of art appreciation. Important essayists include Pater, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons and Vernon Lee (the name adopted by Violet Paget). Their writing was sometimes condemned as 'purple prose' (i.e. writing that's overly elaborate and ornate), because it borrowed from the stylistic techniques of imaginative writing and was often densely allusive and metaphoric. Wilde's writing, especially, also threw off Victorian ideas about earnest and serious argument, instead relishing playfulness and paradox.

Aesthetes played with traditional oppositions or even hierarchies between art and life. Wilde teased his readers with the claim that life imitates art rather than the other way round. His point was a serious one: we notice London fogs, he argued, because art and literature has taught us to do so. Wilde, among others, 'performed' these maxims. He presented himself as the impeccably dressed and mannered dandy figure whose life was a work of art.

For others, similar notions propelled an interest in literature as a material thing of beauty. Intricately crafted books were produced by William Morris's Kelmscott Press, which opened in 1891, dedicated to printing and binding using traditional methods. In part, Morris was striving to preserve traditional skills against the ever-increasing cheap mass production of reading matter. In so doing, he was making an overtly political gesture. Morris was a socialist and rejected capitalist methods of producing goods which, he believed, exploited workers and reduced them to parts in machine-like factory processes. He rejected consumer culture as deadening to the human spirit. However, his own work - including textile and other crafts as well as books - quickly became associated with desirable consumer objects. Aestheticism has often been accused of complicity with the consumer culture it overtly rejected.

Aesthetics and politics

Morris was one among a number of important proponents of aestheticism who saw art as inseparable from political ideals. He drew from the work of the great Victorian critic, John Ruskin, to argue that capitalism enslaves workers, and advocated instead a system in which work is creative as well as productive. In creativity, proper human freedom resides. Oscar Wilde was also a supporter of socialist politics, as was the writer Edward Carpenter. Carpenter was a socialist poet and a gay activist. He wrote as a prophet of a new age of fellowship based on socialist principles and a life lived with simple tastes and commitments to art and learning.

William Morris's News from Nowhere

News from Nowhere by William Morris, 1890. Frontispiece illustration depicts a Socialist ideal of freedom, equality and fraternity across the globe.

Satire and critique

This mixture of radical politics, sexual dissidence and privileging of the individual's experience of beauty was highly alarming to more conventional Victorians. In the press, aestheticism was roundly criticised. It was also the butt of inventive satire. The magazine Punch was a leading force in this respect. Punch attacked figures like Swinburne, the artist James Abbott McNeill Whistler, and Oscar Wilde, creating types like 'the fleshly poet'. Favourite aesthete caricatures included the poet Jellaby Postlethwaite, who had affinities with Wilde and was sometimes drawn to look like Whistler. His artist friend, Maudle, was modelled on Swinburne. In one famous cartoon, Postlethwaite goes to lunch and sits contemplating a lily, preferring to feast his senses on its beauty rather than ordering food. These figures were invented and drawn by the satiric artist George du Maurier, who also has Postlethwaite explaining that he never bathes as 'I always see myself so dreadfully foreshortened in the water, you know.' Brilliant satire, such as Du Maurier's, helped popularise - albeit in distorted form - what were often rarefied poems, essays and arguments.

'An Aesthetic Midday Meal', a satirical cartoon from Punch

George du Maurier's cartoon, "An Aesthetic Midday Meal", satirises the habits associated with 19th century aestheticism.

Usage terms © Punch Ltd
Held by© Punch Ltd

Decadence

By the 1890s, another term had become associated with this focus on 'art for art's sake'. It has origins in common with aestheticism and the two terms often overlap and were sometimes used interchangeably. 'Decadence' was initially used to describe writers of the mid-19th century in France, especially Baudelaire and Gautier. By the century's end, decadence was in use as an aesthetic term across Europe. The word literally means a process of 'falling away' or decline. In relation to art and literature, it signalled a set of interlinked qualities. These included the notion of intense refinement; the valuing of artificiality over nature; a position of ennui or boredom rather than of moral earnestness or the valuing of hard work; an interest in perversity and paradox, and in transgressive modes of sexuality. One of the most important explicators of decadence was the poet Arthur Symons, whose essay 'The Decadent Movement in Literature' (1893), described decadence as 'a new and beautiful and interesting disease'. For Symons - as well as for others who were critical rather than intrigued and entranced - decadence was the literature of a modern society grown over-luxurious and sophisticated.

In France, decadence became associated with a type of poetry exemplified by the writing of Paul Verlaine and Stéphane Mallarmé, and also with the fiction of Joris-Karl Huysmans. Huysmans's most notorious work, Á Rebours - published in 1884, it was translated as Against Nature or Against the Grain - is widely believed to be the notorious 'poisonous' book that fascinates Dorian Gray in Oscar Wilde's 1891 novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray. Huysmans's novel caused a shocked outcry when it appeared. Focused almost exclusively on the inner life of its ailing aristocrat protagonist, Des Esseintes, the novel charts his obsessive sensual experiments. Dorian Gray's passion for studying and collecting jewels or perfumes or ecclesiastical vestments, and surrounding himself with exotic and sensual objects, mirrors Des Esseintes's pursuit of ever more refined sensory experiences.

In England, it was Wilde himself who was identified as central to the English decadent tradition, along with Arthur Symons and the poet, Ernest Dowson. Wilde was important because of his high visibility in fashionable London clubs and theatres. He dressed flamboyantly, sparking fashions that others copied. He was a brilliant self-publicist, and quipped that his life was a work of art. Other important poets include Lionel Johnson and John Davidson. Although often under-recognised until very recently, women also contributed to decadent style. The most important voice was 'Michael Field', the name under which two women, Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper, jointly wrote. The Rhymers' Club, set up by poets W B Yeats and Ernest Rhys in 1890s, also explicitly rejected literary naturalism and embraced experimental modes of writing. 'Symbolist' poetry was closely aligned with aesthetic and decadent styles: all of them aimed to explore the beauty of strange, subjective and unique moments.

Photographs of Oscar Wilde, 1877-1905

Oscar Wilde, a prominent and widely recognised figure within the English decadent tradition, dressed according to Aesthetic principles - a style that was completely at odds with typical late Victorian fashion.

The Yellow Book

One of the most notorious exponents of what was labelled decadence was not a writer, however, but an artist. Aubrey Beardsley's distinctive, witty and often erotic illustrations are immediately recognisable, with their innovative shapes and lines and bold use of black and white space. Beardsley provided the cover illustrations for perhaps the most famous and notorious of decadent publications, The Yellow Book. This was a periodical, featuring essays, poems, fiction and illustrations. Launched in 1894, it ran until 1897. Yellow and green - colours associated with bruising and decay - were associated with decadent style, and The Yellow Book contributed to their startling new appeal. Large format, and beautifully produced, the volumes drew attention to their appeal as objects, like the works from Morris's Kelmscott press. Again, decadence was part of a culture of commercialism as well as of creativity.

The Yellow Book

The notorious periodical, The Yellow Book, which included Aubrey Beardsley's designs and illustrations, 1894-97.

Degeneration and the Wilde trial

Decadence alarmed those who valued 'traditional' norms and values. It seemed to signify a society and culture threatened to its core with decline and decay. By the 1890s, decadence was associated with degeneration, an association popularised by the sensationalist writing of Max Nordau, who condemned writers like Wilde in his 1895 book, Degeneration. But that same year also saw the event that did as much as anything to halt the inventive flourishing of decadence. Oscar Wilde, at the height of his fame as the most popular playwright of the moment, was put on trial. He was charged with gross indecency under recently passed legislation that allowed homosexual acts to be punishable under the law. The trial was an extraordinary media event and its outcome was Wilde's committal to two years hard labour.

Decadence was intimately associated with dissident sexual desires. Wilde's fate left in its wake fear and anxiety for those associated with it. Many felt it wise to distance themselves from its dangerous label. Nevertheless, the experimentalism, creative energy and commitment to thinking against the grain that characterised aestheticism and decadence did much to prepare the ground for the Modernist period, which was beginning to gather its own distinctive powers after the turn of the century.

Footnotes

[1] George Du Maurier, 'An Aesthetic Midday Meal'. Cartoon from Punch (17 July 1880).

Carolyn Burdett is Senior Lecturer in English Literature and Victorian Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research and publications focus on the final decades of the nineteenth century, with particular interests in feminism, psychology, emotions, and ethics. She has published books on the South African writer, Olive Schreiner, and a co-edited essay collection, The Victorian Supernatural. She has also edited journal issues on Eugenics, Victorian Sentimentality and Psychology/Aesthetics. She is currently writing a book called Coining Empathy: Psychology, Aesthetics, Ethics 1870-1920.

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'Art for art's sake'? Aestheticism and decadence shocked the Victorian establishment by challenging traditional values, foregrounding sensuality and promoting artistic, sexual and political experimentation. Dr Carolyn Burdett explores the key features of this unconventional artistic period. Many Victorians passionately believed that literature and art fulfilled important ethical roles.

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The figure of the governess_Victorian society

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The figure of the governess_Victorian society

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The figure of the governess

From Jane Eyre to Vanity Fair, the governess is a familiar figure in Victorian literature. She is also a strange one: not part of the family, yet not quite an ordinary servant. Kathryn Hughes focuses on the role and status of the governess in 19th century society.

The governess was one of the most familiar figures in mid-Victorian life and literature. The 1851 Census revealed that 25,000 women earned their living teaching and caring for other women's children. Most governesses lived with their employers and were paid a small salary on top of their board and lodging.

From the 1840s novelists started to put governesses into their fiction, usually as heroines but sometimes as villains. In 1847 Charlotte Brontë published Jane Eyre, the story of a governess who eventually marries her employer, the brooding Mr Rochester. The same year William Thackeray started publishing instalments of Vanity Fair, in which a scheming young governess called Becky Sharp lies and cheats her way through Regency high society.

Who became a governess?

The first part of the 19th century was marked by deep economic distress. A series of bank failures during and after the Napoleonic Wars, combined with no Welfare State, meant that many middle-class families found themselves destitute overnight. Young men from good homes could leave school and go out to work from the age of 15 without being ashamed. There was always a chance that they would earn back their family's fortune. But their sisters, educated to be 'ladies', would have felt humiliated to be seen serving in a shop or working in a factory alongside working-class girls. The only possibility open to them was to get a job as a teacher, either in a small girls' school or in someone else's home.

Who employed a governess?

The upper classes had employed governesses for centuries. But from the beginning of the 19th century the wealthier sections of the middle classes followed suit. Employing a governess sent a signal that the lady of the house was too 'genteel' to teach her daughters herself. Just as she employed servants to clean her house, she paid another woman to raise her children. Hiring a governess became a status symbol.

What did the governess teach?

Depending on the age of her pupils, the governess could find herself teaching 'the three Rs' (reading, writing and arithmetic) to the youngest, while coaching the older girls in French conversation, history and 'Use of the Globes' or Geography. If her pupils were older teens, the governess would also be expected to instruct them in key 'accomplishments' such as drawing, playing piano, dancing and deportment (i.e. how to conduct oneself properly), all designed to attract an eligible suitor in a very crowded marriage market. The governess might also be in charge of small boys up to the age of eight, before they were sent away to school.

The governess was expected to look after her pupils' moral education too. As well as reading the Bible and saying prayers with them, she was to set a good example of modest, moral behaviour. For that reason, employers put great emphasis on hiring a governess who shared their religious affiliation - Church of England, Methodist or Baptist. Although French governesses were admired for their ability to teach a correct accent, most families would not consider employing a Roman Catholic.

The Governess; or, the Missing Pencilcase

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Idealised depiction of a governess teaching her three pupils, including a young boy, from fictional story The Governess, or the Missing Pencil-Case, estimated 1875.

The outsider

Life was full of social and emotional tensions for the governess since she didn't quite fit anywhere. She was a surrogate mother who had no children of her own, a family member who was sometimes mistaken for a servant. Was she socially equal or inferior to her employers? If the family had only recently stepped up the social scale, perhaps she'd consider herself superior. She was rarely invited to sit down to dinner with her employers, even if they were kind. The servants disliked the governess because they were expected to be deferential towards her, despite the fact that she had to go out to work, just like them. One governess, known only as SSH, recalled how, sitting down to dinner for the first time in a new job, she was overwhelmed by a 'sense of friendlessness and isolation' when she noticed herself pointedly served after the ladies of the house.

The governess often spent the evenings alone and she was sometimes expected to use the schoolroom as her sitting room. Life could feel very lonely: 19 year old Edith Gates, a governess in Reading in the 1870s, confides to her diary how homesick she feels. 30 years earlier Charlotte Brontë tried to avoid going into her employers' sitting room in the evenings because she found it awkward to make conversation with people she didn't know very well.

Getting married was one way that the governess might be able to leave her job. But it was hard for her to meet suitable men. Female employers often worried that the governess might try to marry one of the young gentlemen of the house. For that reason, advice books aimed at employers recommended employing a plain governess. There were many similar books aimed at the governess too, telling her what to teach and how to manage the relationship with her employers. These had titles like 'Mothers and Governesses' and The Complete Governess; a course of mental instruction for ladies.

Most employers only needed the services of a governess for a few years which meant that she frequently found herself having to look for a new situation. Since salaries were so low, there was little chance of saving for illness or retirement. Many governesses found themselves facing poverty in middle age. In 1841 The Governesses' Benevolent Institution was set up to help some of them with pensions.

Article from Punch critiquing the governesses' pay and working conditions, 1843.

Article from Punch about the poor pay for governesses, 1844.

Excerpt from an official report of the Governesses' Benevolent Institution listing women who qualified to receive a charitable pension, 1847.

Governesses in fiction

When Victorian authors wanted to write a novel about a young woman, it made sense for her to be a governess. Just like an orphan, the governess had to make her own way in the world, travelling alone far from home, with no resources to call upon if things went wrong. Her status as a 'lady' allowed her to mix in the best circles, but the fact that she worked meant that she also encountered all sorts of people and situations that would have been far-fetched for a girl who lived with her parents. The governess was a blank slate onto which all possibilities were open, so that novelists could write any plot that they wanted. Charlotte and Anne Brontë, who both published novels with governess heroines, used their real-life experiences of the schoolroom. Other writers, like William Thackeray, drew on stories circulating about scheming governesses who disliked their pupils and were desperate to get on in the world by marrying into their employers' family.

Kathryn Hughes is Professor of Lifewriting and Convenor of the MA in Lifewriting at the University of East Anglia. Her first book The Victorian Governess was based on her PhD in Victorian History. Kathryn is also editor of George Eliot: A Family History and has won many national prizes for her journalism and historical writing. She is a contributing editor to Prospect magazine as well as a book reviewer and commentator for the Guardian and BBC Radio.

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The figure of the governess | The British Library

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From Jane Eyre to Vanity Fair, the governess is a familiar figure in Victorian literature. She is also a strange one: not part of the family, yet not quite an ordinary servant. Kathryn Hughes focuses on the role and status of the governess in 19th-century society.

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DeProfundis: Oscar Wilde's Letter from inside. a BBC radio 4 documentary

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DeProfundis: Oscar Wilde's Letter from inside. a BBC radio 4 documentary

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Stephen Rea reads Wilde's famous letter in the prison cell where it was written. With an introduction from cell C.3.3 in Reading Prison by writer and director Neil Bartlett.

Oscar Wilde was incarcerated in Reading Prison between 1895 and 1897, enduring the Separate System, a harsh penal regime designed to eliminate any contact between prisoners. During this period he wrote one of his last great works: an extended letter to his lover Lord Alfred Douglas, later published as De Profundis.

Here the actor Stephen Rea (The Crying Game, Michael Collins, V for Vendetta) returns to cell C.3.3 in HM Reading Prison to perform De Profundis. The reading is preceded by a feature documentary where writer and director Neil Bartlett examines the conditions under which Wilde was writing.

In Autumn 2016, Reading prison will open to the public for the first time for an Artangel project in which a 30-strong showcase of artists and writers share works in response to De Profundis.

And next week on Radio 4, in Letter from Inside, writers and artists from around the world read letters on the theme of imprisonment. The series is at 7:45pm from 12th to 16th September, with letter writers including Ai Weiwei, Jeanette Winterson, Anne Carson, Gillian Slovo, Joe Dunthorne, Tahmima Anam and Binyavanga Wainana.

Produced by Barney Rowntree and Joby Waldman
Executive Producer: Jeremy Mortimer

A Reduced Listening production for BBC Radio 4.

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BBC Radio 4 - De Profundis: Oscar Wilde's Letter from Inside

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Stephen Rea reads Wilde's famous letter in the prison cell where it was written. With an introduction from cell C.3.3 in Reading Prison by writer and director Neil Bartlett. Oscar Wilde was incarcerated in Reading Prison between 1895 and 1897, enduring the Separate System, a harsh penal regime designed to eliminate any contact between prisoners.

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The Importance of Being Earnest  : film 1952 directed by Anthony Asquith/ film 2002 directed by Oliver Parker/ play 2015 West End Theatre directed by Adrian Noble

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The Importance of Being Earnest  : film 1952 directed by Anthony Asquith/ film 2002 directed by Oliver Parker/ play 2015 West End Theatre directed by Adrian Noble

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The Importance of Being Earnest - Act Three: Interior of the Manor House

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The Importance of Being Earnest - Act Two: Garden at the Manor House

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The Importance of Being Earnest - Act One: Flat in London, England

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"The Importance of Being Earnest" by Oscar Wilde, Act II - Vocabulary List | Vocabulary.com

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Jack and Algernon are two bachelors who use false identities to get what they want-and get into trouble-in this comedy by Oscar Wilde. Read the full texthere. Here are links to our lists for the play: Act I, Act II, Act III Here is a link to our...

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Vocabulary 'IBE' act 3

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"The Importance of Being Earnest" by Oscar Wilde, Act III - Vocabulary List | Vocabulary.com

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Jack and Algernon are two bachelors who use false identities to get what they want-and get into trouble-in this comedy by Oscar Wilde. Read the full texthere. Here are links to our lists for the play: Act I, Act II, Act III Here is a link to our...

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“The Importance of Being Earnest” by Oscar Wilde, Act I - Vocabulary List | Vocabulary.com

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Jack and Algernon are two bachelors who use false identities to get what they want—and get into trouble—in this comedy by Oscar Wilde. Read the full texthere. Here are links to our lists for the play: Act I, Act II, Act III Here is a link to our…

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Quick Facts
"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.""I can resist everything except temptation.""America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up."

Name

Oscar Wilde

Birth Date

October 16, 1854

Death Date

November 30, 1900

Education

Portora Royal School , Magdalen College, Trinity College

Place of Birth

Dublin, Ireland

Place of Death

Paris, France

Full Name

Oscar Wilde

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde

Who Was Oscar Wilde?

Author, playwright and poet Oscar Wilde was a popular literary figure in late Victorian England. After graduating from Oxford University, he lectured as a poet, art critic and a leading proponent of the principles of aestheticism. In 1891, he published The Picture of Dorian Gray, his only novel which was panned as immoral by Victorian critics, but is now considered one of his most notable works. As a dramatist, many of Wilde's plays were well received including his satirical comedies Lady Windermere's Fan (1892), A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), his most famous play. Unconventional in his writing and life, Wilde's affair with a young man led to his arrest on charges of "gross indecency" in 1895. He was imprisoned for two years and died in poverty three years after his release at the age of 46.

Early Life and Education

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was born on October 16, 1854, in Dublin, Ireland. His father, William Wilde, was an acclaimed doctor who was knighted for his work as a medical advisor for the Irish censuses. William later founded St. Mark's Ophthalmic Hospital, entirely at his own personal expense, to treat the city's poor. Wilde's mother, Jane Francesca Elgee, was a poet who was closely associated with the Young Irelander Rebellion of 1848, a skilled linguist whose acclaimed English translation of Pomeranian novelist Wilhelm Meinhold's Sidonia the Sorceress had a deep influence on her son's later writing.

Wilde was a bright and bookish child. He attended the Portora Royal School at Enniskillen where he fell in love with Greek and Roman studies. He won the school's prize for the top classics student in each of his last two years, as well as second prize in drawing during his final year. Upon graduating in 1871, Wilde was awarded the Royal School Scholarship to attend Trinity College in Dublin. At the end of his first year at Trinity, in 1872, he placed first in the school's classics examination and received the college's Foundation Scholarship, the highest honor awarded to undergraduates.

Upon his graduation in 1874, Wilde received the Berkeley Gold Medal as Trinity's best student in Greek, as well as the Demyship scholarship for further study at Magdalen College in Oxford. At Oxford, Wilde continued to excel academically, receiving first class marks from his examiners in both classics and classical moderations. It was also at Oxford that Wilde made his first sustained attempts at creative writing. In 1878, the year of his graduation, his poem "Ravenna" won the Newdigate Prize for the best English verse composition by an Oxford undergraduate.

Career Beginnings

Upon graduating from Oxford, Wilde moved to London to live with his friend, Frank Miles, a popular portraitist among London's high society. There, he continued to focus on writing poetry, publishing his first collection, Poems, in 1881. While the book received only modest critical praise, it nevertheless established Wilde as an up-and-coming writer. The next year, in 1882, Wilde traveled from London to New York City to embark on an American lecture tour, for which he delivered a staggering 140 lectures in just nine months.

While not lecturing, he managed to meet with some of the leading American scholars and literary figures of the day, including Henry Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes and Walt Whitman. Wilde especially admired Whitman. "There is no one in this wide great world of America whom I love and honor so much,'' he later wrote to his idol.

Upon the conclusion of his American tour, Wilde returned home and immediately commenced another lecture circuit of England and Ireland that lasted until the middle of 1884. Through his lectures, as well as his early poetry, Wilde established himself as a leading proponent of the aesthetic movement, a theory of art and literature that emphasized the pursuit of beauty for its own sake, rather than to promote any political or social viewpoint.

On May 29, 1884, Wilde married a wealthy Englishwoman named Constance Lloyd. They had two sons: Cyril, born in 1885, and Vyvyan, born in 1886. A year after his wedding, Wilde was hired to run Lady's World, a once-popular English magazine that had recently fallen out of fashion. During his two years editing Lady's World, Wilde revitalized the magazine by expanding its coverage to "deal not merely with what women wear, but with what they think and what they feel. The Lady's World," wrote Wilde, "should be made the recognized organ for the expression of women's opinions on all subjects of literature, art and modern life, and yet it should be a magazine that men could read with pleasure."

Acclaimed Works

Beginning in 1888, while he was still serving as editor of Lady's World, Wilde entered a seven-year period of furious creativity, during which he produced nearly all of his great literary works. In 1888, seven years after he wrote Poems, Wilde published The Happy Prince and Other Tales, a collection of children's stories. In 1891, he published Intentions, an essay collection arguing the tenets of aestheticism, and that same year, he published his first and only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray. The novel is a cautionary tale about a beautiful young man, Dorian Gray, who wishes (and receives his wish) that his portrait ages while he remains youthful and lives a life of sin and pleasure.

Photo: Universal History Archive/Getty Images

Though the novel is now revered as a great and classic work, at the time critics were outraged by the book's apparent lack of morality. Wilde vehemently defended himself in a preface to the novel, considered one of the great testaments to aestheticism, in which he wrote, "an ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style" and "vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art."

Wilde's first play, Lady Windermere's Fan, opened in February 1892 to widespread popularity and critical acclaim, encouraging Wilde to adopt playwriting as his primary literary form. Over the next few years, Wilde produced several great plays-witty, highly satirical comedies of manners that nevertheless contained dark and serious undertones. His most notable plays were A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), his most famous play.

Personal Life and Prison Sentence

Around the same time that he was enjoying his greatest literary success, Wilde commenced an affair with a young man named Lord Alfred Douglas. On February 18, 1895, Douglas's father, the Marquis of Queensberry, who had gotten wind of the affair, left a calling card at Wilde's home addressed to "Oscar Wilde: Posing Somdomite," a misspelling of sodomite. Although Wilde's homosexuality was something of an open secret, he was so outraged by Queensberry's note that he sued him for libel. The decision ruined his life.

When the trial began in March, Queensberry and his lawyers presented evidence of Wilde's homosexuality-homoerotic passages from his literary works, as well as his love letters to Douglas-that quickly resulted in the dismissal of Wilde's libel case and his arrest on charges of "gross indecency." Wilde was convicted on May 25, 1895, and sentenced to two years in prison.

Wilde emerged from prison in 1897, physically depleted, emotionally exhausted and flat broke. He went into exile in France, where, living in cheap hotels and friends' apartments, he briefly reunited with Douglas. Wilde wrote very little during these last years; his only notable work was a poem he completed in 1898 about his experiences in prison, "The Ballad of Reading Gaol."

Death and Legacy

Wilde died of meningitis on November 30, 1900, at the age of 46. More than a century after his death, Wilde is still better remembered for his personal life-his exuberant personality, consummate wit and infamous imprisonment for homosexuality-than for his literary accomplishments. Nevertheless, his witty, imaginative and undeniably beautiful works, in particular his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray and his play The Importance of Being Earnest, are considered among the great literary masterpieces of the late Victorian period.

Throughout his entire life, Wilde remained deeply committed to the principles of aestheticism, principles that he expounded through his lectures and demonstrated through his works as well as anyone of his era. "All art is at once surface and symbol," Wilde wrote in the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray. "Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex and vital."

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"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." "I can resist everything except temptation." "America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up."

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An introduction to The Importance of Being Earnest

The Importance of Being Earnest draws on elements of farce and melodrama in its depiction of a particular social world. Professor John Stokes considers how Oscar Wilde combined disparate influences into a brilliant satire which contained hidden, progressive sentiments.

A complaint voiced later by a fellow playwright, George Bernard Shaw, that The Importance of being Earnest was Wilde's 'first really heartless play,' ultimately makes a point in its author's favour. Although far from caricatures, Wilde's characters are scrupulously self-interested and they bear a deliberately simplified and parodic relationship to the aristocracy of his own time.[1] They speak a language that sounds similar to how we might imagine members of that class to have spoken yet doesn't pretend to be an exact reproduction. In fact, it's perfectly possible to hear in all the characters echoes of Wilde himself since they are nearly all wits, although their jokes are sometime conscious, sometimes not.

Manuscript draft of The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde

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From Oscar Wilde's manuscript of Lady Lancing, an early draft of what would be later retitled as The Importance of Being Earnest.

Theatrical and social worlds

The play opened at the St James's Theatre in King Street in February 1895, a compact but extremely elegant house then leased by the actor-manager George Alexander. 10 years earlier Wilde had already marked out Alexander as a romantic actor with 'a most effective presence, a charming voice, and a capacity for wearing lovely costumes with ease and elegance.'[2] In 1892 they had worked together on Lady Windermere's Fan. Although the actor had strong opinions of his own - and insisted that a surplus act be dropped from The Importance - the partnership was in many ways the ideal match of two urban sophisticates. The St James was situated in the most fashionable part of town with 'gentleman's clubs' to hand and it was not far from the Albany, a long established block of superior bachelor apartments, or from the popular Willis's restaurant - both of which are mentioned in various versions of the play. The audience at the St James would therefore have seen on stage a reflection, admittedly a distorted one, of a social ambiance that they either knew intimately or had heard a good deal about. Not that The Importance offers a very flattering picture of that world, since it's characterised by underlying greed (if only for buttered muffins), self-indulgence (none of the major characters actually works) coupled with financial insecurity (Lady Bracknell changes her tune completely the minute she hears of Cecily's inherited fortune).

Acting edition of The Importance of Being Earnest

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List of actors from the first performance of The Importance of being Earnest at St James's Theatre in February 1895, from the acting edition.

At the same time the action is continuously, uncontrollably and hilariously absurd. This means that it's not easy to judge the severity of the play's satiric intent, another aspect of Wilde's theatrical ingenuity. What is beyond dispute is his brilliance in devising scenes where the comedy is inbuilt and the dialogue resonates with repressed feeling. Examples are Lady Bracknell's autocratic cross examination of Jack in Act 1, the tea-party scene in Act II where the two women are obliged to make icily polite chit-chat while balancing cups and plates, and the strangely suggestive, though entirely innocent, exchanges between Canon Chasuble and Miss Prism. Objects - 'theatrical props' - play their part too. Algernon's salver bearing cucumber sandwiches, Lady Bracknell's pen and notebook (in which she keeps a record of contenders in the marriage market), Jack's inscribed cigarette case, Miss Prism's battered handbag: all focus our attention on the distinctive accessories of a specific social world.

Photographs of early productions of The Importance of Being Earnest

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Photographs from an early performance of The Importance of being Earnest, 1895.

Place in the repertoire

Although we think, quite rightly, of The Importance as a unique comic achievement, Alexander and his fellow actors were all at home in the Victorian repertoire and well-practised in audience technique. The Importance is original mainly in the perfection of its plot and its consummate style, and it draws on a calculated mix of genres: burlesque, comedy of manners, melodrama and, perhaps most of all, farce. As a reviewer conceded in 1895: 'the very fact that Mr. Wilde's inspiration can be traced to so many sources proves that he can owe very little to any of them and I, for one, certainly do not intend to upbraid him for his eclectic taste'.[3] Farce loves symmetry and The Importance draws on an established tradition in which pairs of characters swap roles and mirror one another. Obvious precedents include Box and Cox by J M Morton (1847) and W S Gilbert's Engaged (1877). The theatre historian Kerry Powell has even shown that Wilde's sublime masterpiece has a surprising amount in common with a long forgotten farce entitled The Foundling that had been performed as recently as 1894.[4] Although brilliantly structured The Importance isn't, in the end, entirely symmetrical because Algernon's name remains unchanged despite Cecily's earlier fascination with her 'wicked cousin Ernest'. A loose end or two makes the triumph of desire over circumstance all the more remarkable and welcome.

Vera, a play by Oscar Wilde

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Title page from Vera; or, the Nihilists, an early melodramatic play by Oscar Wilde dating from 1883.

The earliest influences on Wilde as a playwright were essentially melodramatic -as in his Russian Nihilist drama Vera (1883) or the historical period piece The Duchess of Padua (staged in 1891, but written in the early 1880s). These failed to attract either serious attention or substantial audiences, but by the early 1890s Wilde had moved on from the mainly melodramatic to explore a hybrid form of 'Society Drama' that combined characteristically epigrammatic dialogue with plots based around carefully nuanced moral issues. Lady Windermere's Fan was followed by A Woman of No Importance (1893), and (running concurrently with The Importance of Being Earnest) An Ideal Husband (1895). He was not alone in this move. Ambitious English dramatists of the time refused to be confined to dour imitations of Ibsen or of the hysterical French dramas of adultery associated with the likes of Dumas fils, author of La dame aux camélias. Henry Arthur Jones, Arthur Pinero, even Shaw, all experimented with a mixture of homegrown comedy and ethical dilemma. It was a usefully compromised solution to current demands that the theatre become a respectable cultural milieu, its products elevated to the status of 'literature'. The publication of play texts in book form was seen as a part of this process and it's significant that even after his calamitous time in Reading Gaol, Wilde was anxious to see his work appear in a handsome edition, which it eventually did in 1899.

Limited edition of The Importance of Being Earnest

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Oscar Wilde's signature within one of 12 finely made limited editions of The Importance of Being Earnest, 1899.

Secret meanings and influence

Although sheer good fortune ultimately wins out, Wilde's 'Trivial Comedy for Serious People' is founded upon a mode of intellectual paradox that reveals truth by inverting commonplace wisdom. Even the play's punning title neatly captures and explodes the dominant Victorian moral principle that sincerity is its own reward. Moreover, the title may even have passed a secret signal to members of Wilde's circle since the word 'Earnest' bears a euphonious relation to the term 'Uranian' which was coming to be used to denote homosexual relationships between men of different ages. The idea of a secret life (the 'Bunbury' alibi) would certainly seem to reflect the kind of subterfuge that a gay man might be obliged to adopt in the homophobic climate that, following the introduction of the notorious Criminal Law Amendment act of a 1885, threatened offenders with imprisonment. Wilde of course, was to fall foul of that law himself in the spring of 1895. However, the presence of various other sub-textual hints at homosexuality, recently claimed by some academic critics, remains extremely controversial. Although his greatest moment of triumph immediately preceded his social downfall, we should be careful before forcing Wilde's life into a classically tragic pattern. Not only could he have had no precise idea of what the future might bring when he started to compose the play that he originally called Lady Lancing, it has led an independent life quite apart from the dire misfortune of its author, endlessly revived and inspiring modern plays from Tom Stoppard's Travesties (1974) to Mark Ravenhill's Handbag (1998).

As history has shown, The Importance of Being Earnest is both of its time and ahead of its time. Respecting the more progressive views of the period, all Wilde's plays invariably centre on women who are called upon to realise and demonstrate the superior qualities they possess in comparison with the majority of men. In The Importance Cicely and Gwendolen are as unafraid of expressing themselves as any of the 'New Women' who were coming into prominence in the real world in the 1890s, and - miraculously - their ambitions are fulfilled in the most surprising and entertaining way imaginable.

Footnotes

[1] Quoted by Peter Raby in Oscar Wilde (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 128.

[2] The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, vol. VI: Journalism Part I, ed. by John Stokes and Mark W. Turner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 48.

[3] Unsigned review, Truth, 21 February 1895, xxvii, pp. 464-5, repr. Oscar Wilde. The Critical Heritage, ed. by Karl Beckson (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), pp. 191-3, p. 192.

[4] Kerry Powell, 'The Importance of being at Terry's', in Oscar Wilde and the theatre of the 1890s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 108-23.

John Stokes is Emeritus Professor of Modern British Literature at Kings College London. He is interested in the drama of most periods but has specialised in the theatre of the late 19th century. In 2013 Oxford University Press published two volumes of Oscar Wilde's Journalism that he edited in collaboration with Professor Mark W Turner.

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An introduction to The Importance of Being Earnest | The British Library

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By using this site, you agree we can set and use cookies. For more details of these cookies and how to disable them, see our cookie policy. An introduction to The Importance of Being Earnest The Importance of Being Earnest draws on elements of farce and melodrama in its depiction of a particular social world.

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[ Disponible en español]

1854 Born in Dublin. Son of Sir William Wilde, founder of the first eye and ear hospital in Great Britain, and Jane Francesca Elgee Wilde, a writer.

1864 Enters the Portora Royal School at Enniskillen.

1871 Enters Trinity College, Dublin.

1874-1879 Attends Magdalen College, Oxford. It is a time of conflict for him, conflict between the philosophies of Ruskin and Pater, between Roman Catholicism and Freemasonry, and between heterosexuality and homosexuality. He distinguishes himself for scholarship; also for dressing and acting eccentricly.

1878 Wins Newdigate Prize for his poem Ravenna.

1881 Publishes his first volume of verse, Poems. His manners and attire are satirized in Gilbert and Sullivan's comic opera Patience.

1882 A lecture tour of the United States is a great personal success.

1883 Wilde's first play, Vera; Or the Nihilists was first produced in New York.

1883-1884 Gives a successful lecture tour of the United Kingdom. Writes his second unsuccessful play, The Duchess of Padua.

1884 Marries Constance Lloyd the daughter of a Dublin barrister and a woman with financial resources. Takes a house in Chelsea, an artistic section of London. Makes and builds friendships with fellow artists.

1887-1889 Edits Woman's World, a popular magazine.

1888 Publishes The Happy Prince and Other Tales, a collection of original fairy tales.

1889 Publishes essay on Shakespeare's sonnets in Blackwood's Magazine, "The Portrait of Mr. W. H. " The theory of the essay is that many of the sonnets are addressed to a man. "The Decay of Lying" appears in The Nineteenth Century.

1890 Serializes The Picture of Dorian Gray in Lippincott's Magazine.

1891 Publishes several essays and three books exhibiting his far-ranging interests: Intentions, an important collection of dialogues containing Wilde's aesthetic philosophy; Lord Arthur Savile's Crime, and Other Stones, a collection of short stories; and The Picture of Dorian Gray, his only novel. The novel arouses a storm of controversy over its morality. Publishes another collection of stories, A House of Pomegranates. Produces The Duchess of Padua. Begins his friendship with Lord Alfred Douglas, a friendship that will prove disasterous.

1892 Enjoys great popular success for his production of Lady Windermere's Fan at the St. James's Theatre. Writes (in French) Salom�. It is not produced because of an old law forbidding theatrical depiction of biblical characters.

1893 Produces another success, A Woman of No Importance. Publishes Lady Windermere's Fan. Publishes Salom� in French.

1894 Renowned actress Sarah Bernhardt puts on Salom� in Paris. Wilde publishes Salom� in English translation. Writes The Importance of Being Earnest.

1895 Puts on An ldeal Husband at the Haymarket Theatre and The Importance of Being Earnest at the St. James's Theatre; it is his last and best dramatic work. This is the height of his theatrical success; both plays are popular and critical hits. Infatuated with Douglas, Wilde flaunts the friendship in public, drawing public criticism from Lord Douglas's father. Wilde sues for libel, but then abandons the case. Incriminating evidence that comes to light in cross-examination leads to Wilde's arrest for homosexual offenses. After a hung jury on his first trial, Wilde is found guilty of homosexuality in a second. The sentence is two years at hard labor. He is bankrupted, humiliated.

1897 In prison, writes De Profundis, a moving description of his spiritual progress to religious insight; it will be published in part in 1905 and in full in 1962. On his release from prison, goes in exile to the Continent, where he lives under an alias, Sebastian Melmoth.

1898 Publishes his best known poem, The Ballad of Reading Gaol. Also publishes two letters on prison reform. His wife dies.

1900 After being baptized into the Roman Catholic Church, he dies of cerebral meningitis at the Hotel D'Alsace. He is buried at Bagneaux.

References

This chronology is based in part on Karen Lawrence, Betsy Seifert, and Lois Ratner, The McGraw-Hill Guide to English Literature. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1985, pp. 184-86.

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Disponible en español] 1854 Born in Dublin. Son of Sir William Wilde, founder of the first eye and ear hospital in Great Britain, and Jane Francesca Elgee Wilde, a writer. 1864 Enters the Portora Royal School at Enniskillen. 1871 Enters Trinity College, Dublin. 1874-1879 Attends Magdalen College, Oxford.

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Fifth lecture in the Osar Wilde series. Sos Eltis talks about Oscar Wilde's plays including an Ideal Husband, The Importance of Being Ernest and A Woman of No Importance.

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BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time Archive: Culture